The Great American Racetrack War

As American as Horatio Alger eating apple pie. The rags-to-riches son of immigrants basking in the trappings of wealth and success. Vinny Viola, proud son of Brooklyn and billionaire mogul, raised the trophy last month at Churchill Downs, after winning the 143rd Kentucky Derby with Always Dreaming. The same Vinny Viola, West Point 1977, who three months earlier saw his dream of high office—Secretary of the Army—turn to ashes amid business conflicts. Politics, sports, money, and the military all in one run-for-the-roses: a classic Derby. But for pure drama, none of it compares to the War of the Wild Irish Roses.

In the role of Vinny Viola was one Walter E. O’Hara, the owner of the most profitable racetrack in the country in 1937, Narragansett Park in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Mr. O’Hara was born a poor Irish mill boy in Fall River, Massachusetts but rapidly rose to become a mill owner, a newspaper baron, and one of the richest men in New England by the time he was 40. And like Whitneys, Phippses, and Belmonts before him, O’Hara thought becoming a horseman would help cleanse his lowly pedigree.

Narragansett became the most profitable racetrack in the country in part due to revenue enhancement practices of Mr. O’Hara not universally beloved by horse players. (Being a respected sportsman would be great, but a buck is a buck.) Unlike most racetracks of the day, which paid off to the nearest cent, Narragansett paid off to the nearest nickel—rounded down, of course. These pennies, called the “breaks,” went to the house, and they added up over a year’s racing. O’Hara’s more creative tool for separating the bettor from his money was the carefully managed photo finish. If the placing judges post the results of a close race a bit hurriedly, while illuminating the “photo” finish light a bit tardily, and if upon closer examination the originally posted results were to be amended, there is a fair chance that one or more excitable patrons would rip, tear, or otherwise deface or dispose of that nuisance to a racetrack’s profit—a winning ticket.

A crowd stands in line at betting windows at the racetrack in Narragansett.

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The Rhode Island Racing Division decided that preliminary results would no longer be permitted to be posted in the event of a photo finish, and on September 2, 1937 informed O’Hara of the promulgation. O’Hara, in turn, informed his placing judges that he viewed the new rule as an unwelcome suggestion, best ignored. The placing judges, aware of who signed their pay checks (O’Hara), posted preliminary results as per usual after a photo finish the very next day. This posed a problem for the State Steward at Narragansett, James Doorley, as he was aware of who signed his paycheck: Robert E. Quinn, Governor of the State of Rhode Island.

Walter O’Hara and Bob Quinn hated each other like only two successful Irish Americans could. It is said to have started when O’Hara backed his friend, Pawtucket Mayor Tom McCoy, against Quinn for the Democratic nomination for governor in 1936; but if not that, it would have been something else, as the littlest state was way too small for the both of them.

O’Hara would take a drink if offered on hot summer afternoons, and he spent most of them in his luxurious owner’s penthouse suite above the Narragansett clubhouse, where he not only watched the races but also kept a swanky apartment. So when Steward Doorley confronted O’Hara about the photo finishes, few words got out before O’Hara slugged him unconscious. When the state’s most flamboyant businessman knocks out his principal regulator in broad daylight, word has a tendency to get around. With deliberate speed came Quinn’s verdict: O’Hara must go. The Racing Division ordered Narragansett to remove O’Hara as general manager, effective immediately.

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Some say it’s better to know the judge than the law, which was the case for O'Hara. Superior Court Judge Charles Walsh set aside O’Hara’s removal until a hearing date two days after the end of the 1937 summer racing season. However, by morning, Governor Quinn had the order overturned by a better placed friend--the Presiding Judge of the Superior Court. Not exactly reassured by the dueling injunctions out of its lower courts, the Rhode Island Supreme Court agreed to resolve the controversy on an expedited basis the following week.

A week was long enough for O’Hara to tell his side of the story, as he owned the Providence Star-Tribune, one of Rhode Island’s two daily newspapers and its only tabloid. The day before the Supreme Court hearing, the Star-Tribune published a midnight special edition--a journalistic excess theretofore reserved only for rare and momentous occasions on the order of presidential assassinations, declarations of war, and Red Sox pennants--completely dedicated to the pummeling of Quinn.

O’Hara, on the record in his own newspaper, called the Governor a lying, mentally unstable bribe-taker, likely to end up in an in-patient psychiatric facility.

O’Hara, on the record in his own newspaper, called the Governor a lying, mentally unstable bribe-taker, likely to end up in Butler Hospital, the Providence in-patient psychiatric facility. The headline writers fashioned a front page top bold banner: “Quinn Will Land in Butler” so that when folded in the ordinary manner on newsstands, it read “Quinn in Butler”.

While the Supreme Court was in session hearing the arguments across town, Governor Quinn held a press conference announcing he had lodged a police complaint against O’Hara for criminal libel. That night, while O’Hara and his pal Mayor McCoy were strategizing in the penthouse at Narragansett, a caravan of state police arrived to arrest O’Hara on the libel charge. Mayor McCoy’s contingent of Pawtucket policemen explained in plain language to Quinn’s state troopers that the Mayor and O’Hara preferred not to be disturbed. Facing an actual armed standoff between two police forces and fearing things were going downhill fast, O’Hara agreed to be arrested, but was promptly bailed out by Mayor McCoy.

The following day, the Supreme Court decided in O’Hara’s favor, ruling that the Racing Division had not properly issued the photo finish rule. The timing was quite convenient for O’Hara, as that Saturday was the running of the Narragansett Handicap, the marquee contest of the summer racing season, and the 1937 race was legendary. Seabiscuit was in the midst of the winning streak that made him an improbable hero to a Depression-wary America and inspired the books and movies that would immortalize him. Going for his eighth straight stakes race victory in the Narragansett Handicap, Seabiscuit ran poorly on a sloppy track and finished third.

Seabiscuit pictured during his Depression-era winning streak.

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Notwithstanding O’Hara’s procedural victory in the Supreme Court, the Racing Division unanimously ordered the permanent removal of O’Hara as general manager and the suspension of Narragansett’s racing license for an indefinite period, effectively a regulatory death penalty. Of course O’Hara appealed. The Supreme Court again promised a timely decision.

It is not textbook litigation strategy for a Governor awaiting a decision on the validity of his executive action from a high court to publicly announce an intention to ignore that decision, if unfavorable, as judges lean toward believing the judiciary to be a co-equal branch. Nonetheless, on October 11, 1937, while the Supreme Court was deliberating, Governor Quinn issued a statement that “under no circumstances” would he permit the fall racing season to open at Narragansett with O’Hara as general manager.

Four days later, the Supreme Court, for the second time in a month, unanimously overturned the Racing Division’s removal of O’Hara and the suspension of Narragansett’s license, holding that the Quinn administration’s bias so tainted the proceedings as to render them null and void.

Once he gets a few drinks under his belt, and that happens by ten o’clock in the morning...he’s got the filthiest, filthiest mouth of any man I’ve ever listened to.

Quinn immediately began his own mudslinging campaign against O’Hara, and it turned out O’Hara was guilty of an unspeakable offense to Irish Democrats: he was in bed with the WASP Republicans. O’Hara’s financial backer was none other than the hated patrician Metcalf family, who owned the anti-Catholic Providence Journal and controlled the Rhode Island Hospital Trust Company, the State’s largest bank. The Metcalfs, through Hospital Trust, bankrolled O’Hara’s racetrack, loaning him the money necessary to purchase the land and build the racetrack facilities.

The crowd watches a race at Narragansett Park.

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There was also talk that O’Hara’s mill businesses in Fall River were actually fronts to launder money from bootlegging operations along the New Bedford-Fall River coastline. The talk was specific enough and loud enough from the people in that line of work that even O’Hara’s friends thought there was fire where the smoke was.

And then there was his drinking. O’Hara would start early, rarely not having his first by 9:00 a.m. when still in his bathrobe at the Narragansett penthouse. Most days he was noticeably intoxicated before lunch. And he was a mean drunk. As his partner told it, “Now, he’s alright when he’s sober, but once he gets a few under his belt, and that happens by ten o’clock in the morning, then everybody is a ‘God-damned bastard’, and he’s got the filthiest, filthiest mouth of any man I’ve ever listened to.”

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On Saturday, October 16, Quinn summoned the commanding General of the National Guard and the Chief of the State Police, and informed them that he had issued a proclamation of martial law declaring Narragansett Park to be in a state of insurrection and ordered them to prepare to mobilize and occupy the racetrack the next day. The pretext for the proclamation was the “great danger” that gangsters and other persons of ill repute were preparing to assemble at the racetrack for the fall racing season.

Any sentient person who has spent measurable time near a paddock, then or now, could in clear conscience verify that the lines at the betting windows would vanish if gangsters and other persons of ill repute ceased to assemble at racetracks. They nearly always assemble peaceably, however, as drawing unwelcome attention to themselves interferes with hoped for relaxation and recreation and occasional race-fixing.

When O’Hara arrived at Narragansett that afternoon, he was greeted first with fixed bayonets, but ultimately was allowed access. He took to the public address system from his penthouse, amusing the troopers with his drunken profane denunciations of the Governor.

A trainer and his horse in the winner’s circle at Narragansett Park.

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Monday was the scheduled beginning of the 1937 fall racing season that never was. Thousands of programs for races never to be run remained in boxes, unopened. The track bugler even blew the call to post at 1:15 p.m. to a grandstand vacant but for four stable boys playing cards and four hundred national guardsmen and state troopers assembling machine guns at entrances and patrolling the infield in formation. Within days, the horses and horsemen abandoned Narragansett for other racetracks.

Throughout the occupation, Quinn and O’Hara held dueling press conferences and radio broadcasts, gestating additional libel suits and another arrest of O’Hara. This time Quinn sought to deny bail. Quinn claimed that O’Hara might flee the state. “I would have thought that’s what he wanted me to do”, O’Hara quipped to the judge. The soldiers, reduced to less than seventy by the end of October, stayed on until the scheduled end of the fall racing season, November 11, Armistice Day.

The end of the Great Racetrack War of 1937 was not the end of troubles for Walter O’Hara. On the very day after the Armistice Day ceasefire, a Federal grand jury indicted O’Hara for making over $100,000 of illegal campaign contributions. While O’Hara would eventually beat that rap, for the Narragansett Park investors, the indictment was the last straw. Their stock, which had traded near $12 per share prior to the troubles, was now languishing near $2. They launched a proxy battle to remove O’Hara as general manager and director. Over two-thirds of the shareholders voted for his removal, his personal ownership stake having been depleted by sales of shares to finance his battles with Quinn. By the end of November, the Star-Tribune was broke. Advertisers, leery of controversy and of antagonizing the Governor, shunned the paper and took their chances with a Providence Journal monopoly, which purchased the Star­Tribune in a bankruptcy sale and then shuttered it within months.

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To settle the libel suits, O’Hara issued a public apology to Quinn in March 1938 and then proceeded to announce that he would run as a third party candidate against him in the November election. Neither would win the election, as 1938 witnessed a Republican landslide backlash against the warring Democrats. O’Hara would try for a comeback at Narragansett, waging his own proxy battle at the July 1938 shareholders meeting, but failed and was found to have made false allegations in the proxy statements by the Securities and Exchange Commission. His wife left him in 1939, obtaining a quickie Nevada divorce on the ground of cruelty.

So depleted was Walter O’Hara by this point that, after twelve years of marriage, his wife, who only a few years earlier was provided with a stable of thoroughbred horses and a closet of sable furs, received just $7,500 and a house in Pawtucket. He tried putting together syndicates to build racetracks in Atlantic City and Florida, but each time failed to get licensed. O’Hara died tragically on February 2, 1941, at age 44, in a head on collision driving his Packard back to Pawtucket from a dog track in nearby Taunton, Massachusetts. The one-time multi-millionaire left an estate with a net value of only $193.81.

When McCoy Stadium was finally completed in 1942, it cost nearly as much to build as Yankee Stadium.

Mayor McCoy was never elected to higher office. He died four years after O’Hara at age 61. Today, he is best remembered for the baseball stadium that bears his name, the home of the Triple A Pawtucket Red Sox. For reasons undisclosed, McCoy chose a low­lying swamp for the sight of his namesake monument, resulting in repeated cost overruns and construction debacles (60 huge concrete pilings sank in the swamp).

It was rumored that the contractors, all friends of McCoy, were not greatly saddened by this. It was also widely rumored that McCoy, with friends, owned the swamp. All escaped indictment. The Providence Journal took to calling the project “McCoy’s Folly.” When it was finally completed in 1942, years late, the planned 15,000 seat McCoy Stadium seated only 6,000 and cost nearly as much to build as Yankee Stadium.

After losing the Governor’s race, Quinn’s once promising political career was over. He went back to practicing law and was later appointed to, of all positions, the United States Court of Military Appeals.

By the mid-1970’s, Narragansett, once the most profitable racetracks in the country, was hemorrhaging money due to aging facilities, a reduced caliber of racing, a tragic stable fire in 1976 that killed 19 horses and the general sense of seediness there. Narragansett Park’s end came on Labor Day 1978. The City of Pawtucket converted the facility into an industrial park that remains today. The only reminders of the area’s colorful and storied past are the street signs, bearing the names of the great horses that once ran there: War Admiral Place, Whirlaway Place and, of course, Seabiscuit Place.

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